Marking 77 years to the extermination of the Jewish Community of Macedonia

Home » Articles » Marking 77 years to the extermination of the Jewish Community of Macedonia

March 11, 2020

Due to the corona virus development the annual “March of the Living”, that was about to take place today, March 11 2020, is postpone until further notice. We take this opportunity to publish a monologue written by Dr. Rachel-Shelly Levy Drummer, a direct descendant of the Levy and Abarbanel families of Bitola Macedonia

I am here to be the advocate of the Jews of Macedonia defeated by the Bulgarian Tsar Boris III and his army

“… The king canceled
the order on March 10, 1943. Bulgarian Jewry breathed a sigh of relief: about
48,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved from extermination.” Thus ended an
article on the rescue of the Jews of Bulgaria (Ha’aretz 16.4.2014) in a
welcoming tone of praise to the Bulgarians. And I, a member of my
second-generation family of a Macedonian family, was horrified! At home, they
did not stop telling us how exactly on that damn night, on March 11, 1943, all
the Jews of Macedonia-7144 were sent to the extermination-by whom? By those
Bulgarians! None of those sent to Treblinka returned!

97 of the deportees are
members of my immediate family – the Levy and Abarbanel families of Macedonia
and the details. Yes, yes, those Bulgarians who sent to extermination also the
Jews of Trakia in total destroyed without a blink 11343 Jews! And how shall I
sing a song of praise to the Bulgarians! And how can an Israeli and some Jew
sing a song of praise to the Bulgarians even if they did not send the Bulgarian
Jews themselves to extermination?

he Bulgarian Czar Boris, who
was Hitler’s ally, took power in Macedonia and Trakia by virtue of an agreement
signed with Hitler. These areas were called the annexed territories (Bulgaria).
The same Czar Boris who, under Bulgarian pressure, canceled the transport of
the Bulgarian Jews to the camps, sent for extermination the Jews of the annexed
territories without batting an eyelid. Thus, in the middle of that night, March
11, 1943, the Bulgarian army and police collected the 7,500 Macedonian Jews
from whom they were sent for extermination in Treblinka 7144 in three
transports from the “execution contractors” – the police and the
Bulgarian army to the Germans and from there directly to extermination in the
gas chambers in Treblinka! No one came back.

It seems that this matter was
fully coordinated between the Bulgarian army and the SS: “The German
Theodore Dannecker entrusted Alexander Belev, the commissar for Jewish affairs
in Skopje, with the supervision of the liquidation of the Jews of Macedonia
(Jenny Lebel, tide and break: 206). In her book: “The reports from the
Bulgarian forces in the area flowed into the heart: On March 11, 1943, at 5 am,
the army would impose a curfew in the quarters where the Jews’ homes were
concentrated.” (Lebel, 208) During the period between the transports on
March 21, 1943, Beckerle, the German ambassador to Sofia, Alexander in the
Bulgarian heart, and Theodore Dannecker of Germany, and Nir Baruch in his book
notes that “together with the extermination of Yehud The Bulgarian
population is responsible for the extermination of 11343 Jews sent by the
Bulgarians to the death camps “(Nir Baruch, Destruction and Survival in United
Bulgaria, 2003: 9) The extermination of the Macedonian community that took
place under the responsibility of the Bulgarian army was almost total.

View of Macedonia; Jewish Cemetery

The few survivors lived
because they joined the partisans, carried foreign passports, or were doctors
and pharmacists. But worse than this destruction was the forgetfulness – the
Macedonian Jews who were mostly exterminated (97%) had no one left to use their
mouths to tell their stories and remember their destruction by the Bulgarian
army and under the command of Tsar Boris.

In 1994, a monument was
erected in the KKL-JNF Forest in memory of Tsar Boris for the rescue of
Bulgaria’s Jews, and a public committee was set up in the KKL-JNF headed by
Justice Beisky. The commission concluded that the JNF had to remove the sign in
memory of the Tsar because of his direct responsibility for the destruction of
the Jews of Macedonia Thrace, the time had come to uproot the myth of the
Bulgarian myth that was in the public consciousness, and that Boris Boris III
was Hitler’s partner and ally and was responsible for the extermination of all
7,140 Macedonian Jews And another 4,000 Thracian Jews.

True, the Bulgarian Jews were
saved from annihilation, but it was precisely those who decided not to send
them from the camps that were the destroyers of the Jews of Macedonia. We, the
few survivors of Macedonia, are turning to you. The survivors of Bulgaria and
their children, together with the memory of the rescue of the Jews of Bulgaria,
please remind us of the destruction of your Macedonian brothers (and sometimes
your family) by those who did not send you to extermination.

As the only descendant of a magnificent family sent to be exterminated by Tsar Boris and the Bulgarian army, I demand that justice be done! The murder of 11,500 Jews in Macedonia and Thrace is murder is murder! Even if the murderers refrained from murdering another 48,000 Jews, even then they are still murderers, and so should be noted! Dr. Rachel Levy-Drummer, Kiryat Ono